Education
PhD, 2008 Claremont Graduate University
MA, 1996 University of Texas, Austin
Dr. Sharon Becker, PhD
Lecturer III
Areas of Expertise
American literature
Composition
K-pop
Biography
Dr. Becker teaches first year writing, American literature, and storytelling in K-pop videos, group storylines, and fan culture. She has also recently taught a course on semiotics through K-pop videos. Her research is currently focused on Korea’s N-po generation and how their concerns are reflected in contemporary K-pop videos. Her most recent conference presentations include “Crawling, Fighting, Bleeding, Now I'm Sick of It”: K-pop’s N-po Generation and “I’ll Give You My Blood”: Monsters, Murder, and Masculinity in the K-pop Gothic. She also has a chapter on gay celebrity autobiography in the forthcoming in A History of American Gay Autobiography from Cambridge University Press.
Research:
Current research includes analyses of two Manic Street Preachers’ albums: a study of the body as a vehicle of political resistance within the songs of The Holy Bible, and melancholia, Welsh identity, and the working class on Everything Must Go; Britpop, Cool Cymru and issues of nationhood in England and Wales in the 1990s; the formation of male identity in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.
Publications:
Book review, Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office by Lynn Peril. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 41.5, July 2012
Guest editor, “Oh Pretty Boy, Can’t You Give Me Nothing But Surrender?: The Presence and Importance of Women in Punk Rock,” special issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, January 2012
Co-author, with Wendy Martin: “The Cold War Novel: The American Novel Between 1945-1970” Blackwell Companion to the American Novel, Wiley-Blackwell (2011)
Co-editor, with Wendy Martin and Danielle Hinrichs: Anthology of the Short Story, Houghton Mifflin (2006)
Co-author, with Wendy Martin: “Eudora Welty,” “Mary McCarthy,” and “Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Overview” Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Oxford University Press (2004)
Recent conference presentations:
“’What a Lovely Nib Trout Fishing in America Would Make’: Writing Contemporary Manhood Into Existence in Trout Fishing in America”; American Literature Association Conference, Washington D.C., May 2014
“Bored Out of My Mind: The Manic Street Preachers and the Beauty of Boredom”; Popular Culture Association National Conference, Chicago, IL April 2014
“In The Drooping Hours: Melancholy and New Masculinity in This Side of Paradise”; American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, 2013
“’The World is Wrong’: Tate Langdon, Kit Walker, and Perpetual Boyhood on American Horror Story”; Popular Culture Association National Conference, Washington D.C. 2013
“The Hard Times of Being a Modern Man: Economic Failure and Masculine Malaise in The Crack-Up Essays;” Fitzgerald in the 1930s: Trauma and Literary Celebrity; American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA 2011
“Something, Someone, Some Spirit”: Haunted Masculinity and Kerouac’s Debt to Whitman in On the Road;” The Beats and Walt Whitman Conference, Brooklyn, New York, March 2010
Memberships/Affiliations:
Modern Language Association, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Richard Brautigan Society, Popular Culture Association